My wife is offended that you included Davidson and left out Wake Forest.

Little personal tidbit: she said her college choices were down to Emory or Wake, and she chose Wake because ‘it had a football team.’ Every time I crack a smile about that, she reminds me that Mackovic’s Meatballs beat us her senior year.

Exactly. Most school officials and coaches Will be flying in anyway for their on-air appearances. What difference does it make if most of these guys have to fly in to CLT instead of sat ATL? An extra 15 minutes on the plane? It’s not like these studios are open to the public. The studio is closer to the SC border than to downtown Charlotte anyway.

Why is the SEC so afraid to take reigns and control its own TV destiny? Are they waiting for more leverage? Better reputation for quality football? Some other conference to test the waters? They seem afraid to try. Sure it will require a short term investment, but the rewards are huge and there might not be a better time. What if all the money the BIgTen network shifts some power that way? With Corch, just throw gobs of money at Saban and Carroll, or another big name and the tables are flipped.

you should read the article above. I think that the cable landscape is going to change dramatically in the next 5 years and if the Big 10 network can no longer get their premium from every subscriber in a base(think NYC and Rutgers) and they have to get it from the people who actually want it, how does that change the money?

I dont think that the Big 10 is going to be happy about their network if things go a la carte or decoupled.

Sports programming is one of THE drivers of real time programming. Thus it will carry a premium over channels like food network or VH1. And the SEC, while still sort of regional, has the best chance for a huge chunk of the pie nationally, in my opinion. Better than the Big-can’t counts or the USCw/Oregon conf. I personally don’t absolutely need Cable if I have MLB online and the SEC network…assuming NFL is still mostly on the major networks. They could be the winners out of either situation if they don’t give it away to ESPN. If Texas can do it…

Actually it is, DIF. When/if a la carte happens and every old lady in the US drops ESPN the dough for all these deals will dry up. Likewise when the internet smartguys who like football figure out that you can get the games on the ‘net without buying cable (a bunch of them already know that and it is spreading like mad) not to mention other programming like movies and network TV. ESPN and the cable giants will be in deep sh!t then. It’s definitely coming.

Because Slive adheres to The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Dirty Harrys (the other six are in Mike’s .44 used for hunting small varmints) and doesn’t want to take reigns and control our own TV destiny because he’s a short-timer?

Dumb move. The CFB HoF is going to be in Atlanta, and between all the movies filming around town, the Grady College grads, and CNN, there’s far more potential talent to put a network together. Plus I have friends in Charlotte who will lord this over me when they find out.

Well, it’s not being made from scratch. ESPNU is based there, and many of the personnel and production resources are already in place. If it doesn’t really matter where your studio is located, this makes a lot of sense.

One of the nation’s major satellite uplink facilities is outside of Raleigh. Major fiber links between Charlotte and Raleigh. Lots of redundancy and bandwidth at reduced costs – if they are taking advantage of that. I have no idea if they are.

Ted Turner launched his broadcasting career in Charlotte. It’s always been a city ahead of the curve in that industry – lots of experience and talent already there.

That’s in addition to being able to use the ESPNU infrastructure already there, as previously noted by Sanford.

Atlanta may have worked just as well on those fronts, and certainly HQ does not have to be co-located with the production site.

Jesus folks, the SALES office is in Atlanta….nothing else matters….ESPN has a huge production facility on the south side of Charlotte…the only thing that goes on there is stuff knowbody cares about. (until there is a technical problem with 30 seconds to go in the fourth quarter.)